Category Archives: SE Asian

My Lai wasn’t the only such massacre conducted in the Vietnam War by US troops. There were many more, but the number of killed in each incident was typically fewer. Numbers were often 10-20, but ranged from five to 30 all the way up to 100. Most took place between 1966-1968.

In fact, there were 19 Allied massacres in My Lai’s province alone in the first three months of 1968. A number of them were conducted by ROK South Korean troops.

One woman approached me as she walked past and, pointing to her four children who were manfully helping the smallest ones over the rough ground, whispered: ‘How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?’ One old man, as he passed me, hissed: ‘Germany will pay a heavy penance for this mass murder of the Jews.’ His eyes glowed with hatred as he said this. Nevertheless he walked calmly into the gas-chamber.

Bodies lie on the road heading out of the village of Son My, South Vietnam. There was not one military aged man in the entire village. All military men were no doubt either in the ARVN or even more probably in the Viet Cong.

50 years ago today, the My Lai Massacre took place at Son My, South Vietnam.

RIP to the 504 Vietnamese villagers, mostly women and children, who were murdered by US and South Vietnamese forces that day. It is not often reported that ARVN soldiers were involved, but looking at photos of the massacre, there were a number of soldiers with obviously Vietnamese faces mixed in with the Americans. US and ARVN soldiers often fought in mixed units.

My understanding is that My Lai was just the tip of the iceberg. There were many more murders of South Vietnamese civilians that were committed by US troops during the Vietnam War. Entire areas were termed “free fire zones.” That meant that you could shoot at any persons, Viet Cong and civilians, seen in that zone. Helicopters used to fly over rice paddies shooting at villagers in their rice fields. Anyone not directly associated with the US or South Vietnamese governments was considered to be an enemy in these free fire zones.

No one was ever really punished much for this war crime. Lieutenant Calley was convicted and sentenced to only three years of House Arrest. Colonel Medina was much more responsible, but he got off completely, not to mention other higher-ups who directly ordered the massacre. Soldiers were told that everyone in the village was VC and the orders were to kill everyone in the village. US troops had lost 40 men in the area in the previous months and they were out for revenge.

One Black US soldier was wounded in the massacre. He accidentally shot himself in the foot. He later claimed that he did this intentionally to get out of the killings. A US helicopter crewman who watched the massacre unfolding below landed his helicopter and got between the villagers and the soldiers and said they would have to kill him if they wanted to keep killing villagers. Incredibly, the entire event was recorded by US combat photographers.

The next day, US newspapers carried reports of a battle in Song My, South Vietnam in which 128 Viet Cong had been killed. Mysteriously, US troops suffered only one slightly wounded.

The people who ran Taiwan were the same folks who had completely run China into the ground by 1949, resulting in a life expectancy of 1949. Their legacy was repeated famines, foot-binding, murder of female children, epidemic wife-beating and more or less feudal relations in the countryside. Most Chinese peasants were little more than slaves or serfs. They were serfs on a landlord’s feudal estate.

The landlord or his buddies could go visit the serfs at any time and do whatever he wanted to with them? He had the power of life and death over them. He could kill or beat up any serf he wanted to at any time. He could steal any of their property. And especially he could rape the wives and daughters of the peasants, which he did in epidemic form.

When the Communists took over, in the first few years, they did a land reform, dissolved the feudal estates and distributed the landlords’ land to peasants with no compensation. The Communists simply stole the landlords’ land. And in same time period, the Communists decided to put the landlords on trial. The trials were held in the villages and towns and the peasants were to serve as judge and jury. These were wild raucous public trials and in most cases, the peasants convicted the landlords of many of the crimes above and sentenced them to death. Up to 3 million landlords were executed by the peasants themselves.

This is what happens in peasant uprisings under feudalism. Study the subject of peasant uprisings down through time, and this is how they always end up. For centuries before feudalism was dismantled, there were peasant uprisings the world over. They even occurred in Peru under Inca rule! Usually they were horrifically bloody and if the peasants won, typically they simply killed all the feudal lords and everyone who helped them. The Chmielnicki Uprising in the 1500’s in Poland resulted in all the landlords and half the Jews because they were tax collectors for the landlords. But it also caused the deaths of 1/3 of the population of the country!

Under the Nationalists, feudalism and warlordism was the way in China. There was almost no state at all. Feudal landlords also served as warlords. Their warlord armies held sway in the countryside.

Go read The Good Earth by Pearl Buck sometime. That is what life was like in China under the Nationalists and that was the same way it had been for centuries. The Nationalists did not give a damn about anyone who was not rich. It was a feudal party of landlords and warlords.

The Taiwan miracle happened because when the Nationalists fled China, they took almost every nickel in the country with them. That’s why Mao had such a hard time at first. He was starting with more or less nothing. Also they completely dismantled the feudal landlord-warlord system under severe pressure from the US. Then they did a land reform under heavy pressure from the US also. Then the US flooded money into Taiwan for decades in an effort to make Taiwan an anti-Communist showcase, sort of a propaganda exhibit to compare it with China.

Sure the Nationalists turned around Taiwan. Taiwan has a population of what? 50 million? Try doing that with 1.3 million. And the only reason Taiwan junked warlordism, landlordism and feudalism and did a land reform was because Mao won the war. If Mao would have lost the war, China would have just continued with their landlordism, warlordism and feudalism because that was how the Nationalists had governed for decades before and how their predecessors had governed for centuries before that.

If Mao wouldn’t have won, why would the Nationalists have dismantled the system? And don’t forget that 4% of the population left the country and took almost every dime in the place with them when they left. If they would have stayed the money would have stayed in China, so the nationalists would have had 96% less money. Show me how they do their miracle now? And if there had been no revolution, why would the Nationalists have made those massive economic changes they did when they went to Taiwan. Getting rid of landlordism, feudalism and warlordism was a response to the threat of Communism. If they would have continued on with the system the Nationalists were running in China on Taiwan, they would have had another Communist uprising on the island for sure.

Oh and one more thing. When the Nationalists fled to Taiwan, one of the first things they did was to kill 300,000 Communists in Taiwan.

That’s wrong. Viets already looked very mongoloid (flat-faced) before the Chinese invaded their country ~ 2200 years ago. Anthropologists Mongoloid-looking people already appeared in Vietnam ~3800 years ago. After Viets broke free from China, they took Champa and Cambodia and absorded those peoples (less mongoloid-looking peoples).

Viets became much more diverse that you can see today. If you keep tracing back then every country in Asia was not mongoloid looking. Japan only started to looked mongoloid ~2500 whereas. Ainu people were roaming in northern Asia very early…Oldest mongoloid skull found in Asia is only about 7000 years old.

I do not agree with this in whole, but I do agree with it in part.

The Dabut Culture began ca. 8,000 YBP but developed from 5,000-6,500 YBP. This culture was found in the northern part of Middle Vietnam (provinces Nghe An and Ha Tinh). Radiocarbon dating for this culture gives dates from ~3,500-5,000 YBP.
Anthropological studies show that Australoid elements dominate in the skulls of Da But, Con Co Ngua, Quynh Van and Bau Du. They belong to Mongoloid-Australoid or Melanesian race.

Skulls of the Peinan culture on the southeast coast of Taiwan look very much like this and may be related. The Man Bac people were Austronesians. Man Bac skulls are classed as the Ancient SE Asians – the Indonesian race. Recently, a very important burial field of those people was excavated at the Ninh Binh (Northern Vietnam) site of Man Bac. A 14C-dating for this site is 3,530 YBP.

But the first human occupation here could have been as early as 4,000 YBP. It was the age of many late Neolithic, early metal age cultures such as Phung Nguyen, Hoa Loc, Ha Long and Go Ma Vuong. These people were living in real villages. Some of them had already developed an agricultural society as in the case of Phung Nguyen culture. A great deal of rice and rice artifacts were found in the late phase of this culture. They cultivated Oriza Sativa, a large developed type of this grain.

Growing rice established new cultural developments with lots of settlements with rich potsherd layers, many domestic animal bones and rice remains. The non-food productions of pottery, stone tools, and especially jade ornament artifacts showed that a surplus economy in food production had developed. For the Pre-Ðôngsonian culture (2,800-3,500 YBP), many big burial fields in the Delta of Ma River have been excavated.

Pre-Ðôngsonian skulls have strong elements of Australoid, but elements of Mongoloid are clearly increasing – Austronesians. The Quy Chu and Nui Nap people are identified with the Southeast Asian or Indonesian race. Ðôngsonian – or Ðông Son – Culture in Vietnam was regarded as the most developed culture in late prehistory of Vietnam. It began 2,700-2,800 YBP, and ended with the complete occupation by the Han Dynasty in 2,200 YBP.

The Ðông Son culture belonged to the Iron Age and is found mainly in North Vietnam, southward only to Da Nang (18N latitude) and northward to southern Kwangzi and Kwangtung of China. The Ðông Son are Tai. Anthropological research confirms increasing Mongoloid elements in the Ðông Son skulls. However, the Ðông Son peoples belonged to the Indonesian or Ancient Southeast Asian group – a Southern Mongoloid with strong Australoid elements (Cuong, 1996).

In summary, in response to the poster’s comment, I do not agree with him that Vietnamese were full Neomongoloids 3,800 YBP. This is just not correct.

3,800 YBP Vietnamese were part of the Dabut Culture. Dabut people were Mongoloid-Australoid transitionals or Paleomongoloids. Skulls from Man Bac 3,500 YBP show that the Man Bac people were ancient Austronesians possibly from the Peinan Culture in Southeastern Taiwan. These people are classed as the Ancient Southeast Asian Race which is today the Indonesian Race. So 3,500 YBP, Vietnamese looked like Indonesians. This race is a Southeast Mongoloid Race with strong Australoid elements.

From 2,800-3,500 YBP, the Pre-Ðôngsonian Culture existed in Vietnam. These would also be classified as the Indonesian Race, but Mongoloid elements are now increasing over the Australoid. These people were also classed as Austronesians, possibly once again from Taiwan. These would be Taiwanese aborigines.

By 2,200 YBP, there was a huge invasion of Vietnam by the Southern Chinese Han who conquered the entire nation. At this point the transition to modern Vietnamese began. Modern Vietnamese are best seen as a Southeast Mongoloid Race with some Australoid elements. They are probably best seen as Neomongoloids as opposed to Paleomongoloids.

Jason Y: New Filipino president hates America and is even meaner than Hugo Chavez.

Glad to hear it.

Jason: The people there though, in general, still like America.

Too bad. They really need to quit doing this. Filipinos’ love for America is probably screwing them up more than anything else because as usual,

America loves the fact that the Philippines is a shithole and wants to keep it that way as long as possible. By worshipping America, Filipinos are essentially cheering for the fact that they live in a shithole and saying they never want to climb out.

Further, America would get very angry if the Philippines ever started to get their act together, which they have probably never done at any time in their history, though give them some credit in the War of Independence and World War 2.

Jose Rizal was a great man. Where is the Filipino Jose Rizal in 2016? He doesn’t exist. Pathetic. Few Filipinos these days have anywhere near his majestic decency.

They are too wrapped up in the moronic self-harming culture of America worship to even figure out why their country is so messed up. And Filipinos are worse than Americans at voting against their self-interest. Worse, Filipinos are even incapable of understanding what their self-interests even are (sound like Americans?) while Americans are sort of starting to get a clue to the disease they have, though we are choosing the wrong cure as usual. But if you want to get better, have have to first get a good diagnosis.

But Filipinos will never get anywhere until they start hating us like we deserve to be hated. That’s Step #1.

This is the aunt of a friend of mine. The family is from Singapore. They are part of an ethnic group called the Pernakans, a Southern Chinese group that moved to Malaysia ~600 years ago for some reason, possibly due to overcrowding in Fujian or worse, the terrible wars that periodically raged through the region.

Chinese groups have been leaving from this part of Southern China for a very long time now, especially in the last 200 years. In the past couple of centuries, this part of China has become very crowded. Possibly as a result, wild and vicious wars periodically raged through the area, sometimes killing 100,000’s of people. If you study Chinese history, you will hear about these wars a lot. It is not uncommon to read that invaders conquered several large cities and exterminated the whole populations of perhaps 300,000 people, men, women and children. This is how the Chinese have often fought wars. Chinese wars are unbelievably vicious and savage.

The Pernakans moved to Malaysia, and over time, bred in with Dutch and Portuguese and to a lesser extent British Europeans. All three were colonists in the region. I believe that they were Min speakers, but their Hokkien has gotten so changed, in particular from massive borrowings from Malay, that these languages in general are no longer intelligible with Amoy or Taiwanese Hokkien Proper.

Most Pernakans now are somewhat Eurasian, Chinese crossed with Dutch, Portuguese and sometimes British. The Pernakans had their own patriarchal culture and were known as very hard workers, often at manual labor type jobs like farming, timber harvest are working on rubber plantations. They committed little crime and had very orderly societies. The European colonists marveled at their high level of civilization. They did keep slaves, but they probably treated their slaves better than any slaves have ever been treated, and in many cases, slaves were freed.

Over time, most Pernakans also bred in with Malays. Pernakans are now a Chinese/Malay/European race, but the Asiatic tends to be prominent over the European in the stock. The mixing of cultures over 600 years in Malaysia resulted in some very interesting fine cuisine.

Many of these Chinese migrated to Singapore, where they, along with Teochew speakers (another Min group) and a large group of Cantonese Chinese, form what is known as the Singaporean Chinese, one of the wealthiest and most economically advanced ethnic groups on Earth. There is still a division of labor in Singapore, with Chinese on top, Malays on the bottom, and Southern Indian Dravidian speakers in between. Nevertheless all three groups are substantially mixed by this point. Most Chinese have Malay blood, and a lot of Malays have some Chinese in them. Malays and Indians are now intermarrying quite a bit. There is some ethnic conflict but not a lot possibly due to the wealth and everyone being so mixed.

Although this woman has a somewhat archaic phenotype (note prognathism), these archaic types are fairly common in Southern China. Many can be seen in the mountains of Yunnan Province. The archaism may be due to incomplete transition from Australoid -> Mongoloid, as the transition happened much later in Southern China than in Northern China, and prominent Australoid types were common in the far south of China only 3-4,000 YBP.

I also believe that this woman may be admixed with Caucasian. And I think the Malay admixture is quite clear. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I think I see some Vedda influence here. That would not be unusual, as Malays were Veddoids only until quite recently, and the Senoi are Veddoids to this day. The Mani Negritos are also still extant.

The transition in Malaysia went from Australoid Negritos (Mani) and Orang Asli -> Australoid Veddas (Senoi) -> Paleomongoloid Southeast Asians (modern Malays). The Malays appear to be aware of this transition, as they state that the Mani and Orang Asli are their ancestors. The bloodline of the Orang Asli goes back 72,000 YBP, so this group has been present in Malaysia since the very first Out of Africa groups, and their archaism is about on a par with the Andaman Islanders, another Australoid group which is also the remains of some of the earliest OOA groups.

Land reform would have been a great idea. But, I don’t think the South’s dictatorship would’ve done it, ever. Have the U.S. leave and just encourage land reform? That would have lasted only a few minutes before another military coup.

Most of these 3rd World “Communist” revolutions are just wars over land. Peasant revolts have happened all down through human history all over the world, and they tend to be bloody as Hell. There were very bloody peasant revolts in the Incan Empire.

If the revolt succeeds, and it has many times, typically the peasants simply simply kill every single one of the landlords. These are pretty much genocidal wars, and they always have been. Study history. Feudalism doesn’t work. Humans will simply not put up with it. Sooner or later it ends up in a bloodbath.

In Vietnam, a land reform was never done. That was Third Rail, the Rubicon over which the South Vietnamese regime would never cross. It was basically a government of rich landlords, feudal latifundistas. The state would have sooner commit mass suicide than give up the privileges of the landlords.

In revolutionary situations, this is typical. These wars are usually just a fights over land, but the state never does a land reform because that is the last thing on Earth that they will do.

The South Vietnamese did do a couple of fake land reforms pretty much because the US forced them to, but those were not even real. Fake land reforms are very common during these revolutionary situations and are usually done because the US is forcing the regime being rebelled against to end the revolt by distributing land. These fake land reforms never end the revolution; it just keeps on going.

In South Vietnam, 2% of the landowners in the countryside owned 98% of the land. Everyone one else was an abused landless peasant working for a feudal landlord. Class relations in the countryside were essentially feudal ans in China pre-1949. Feudal land relations in the countryside are unsustainable in our era and almost always lead to Communist or Leftist revolutions.

And to be honest, that was much of the reason for the whole damned war right there. It was a war over land in the rural areas.

This article is by Nominay, a veteran commentator at Beyond Highbrow. He has his own site where he posts mainly about the JFK assassination but also on current events and in defense of liberalism generally. His blog is called The Endangered Left. This piece originally appeared there.

Did the tentacles of the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy reach into the State Department? Unfortunately, I harbor suspicions that Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. was involved. As JFK’s 11th hour Ambassador to South Vietnam, Lodge joined the Kennedy administration just in time to make matters worse for that country. Kennedy is often blamed, and rightly so, for the lukewarm consent he gave for President Diem to be overthrown in a coup, but the manner in which his consent was brought about, and what was done with that consent once it was given, was used against Kennedy by his own representatives at State. Chief among them was Henry Cabot Lodge, who worked in concert with the CIA division in Saigon.

What Kennedy knew to some extent in the lead up up to Diem’s assassination was that Lodge and the CIA had flattened the flexibility he sought for his options to remain open. As Kennedy had seen it, there was still a slight chance that diplomatic relations between his administration and Diem’s could be restored, and there was no apparent leader to succeed Diem who offered any hope for an improvement. Kennedy resorted to threatening Diem with a pull out of US troops in South Vietnam in order to bring him back in line with the US effort there, but also to save Diem from his own government.

He wanted a coup to be avoided if a way to reverse Diem’s declining popularity and support was possible. Still, Kennedy had not opposed a coup however, which, per assurances given to him, would see Diem upon resignation being provided safe passage out of the Presidential palace and into exile.

As hopelessly divided as the Kennedy administration was over how to “govern” South Vietnam, Kennedy liked Diem personally and had known him since 1951. As a Congressman, JFK visited Vietnam to learn more about the fight there against the communists, when the struggle belonged to France. Now, in 1963, with the US having replaced France, Kennedy was trying to use his insight from that failed, foreign intervention to determine the best action to take in what was precipitously becoming a confusing quagmire.

These problems with South Vietnam had always discouraged Kennedy from widening a US presence there the way nearly his entire administration wanted, which was a full scale war upwards of 210,000 troops. Kennedy refused to entertain the idea of an engagement anywhere close to this magnitude no matter what the conditions on the ground were. Even as he gave the order to increase more military advisers there, Kennedy was demanding from his top brass that they provide him with a withdrawal plan that included a tight timetable.

Once he became US Ambassador to South Vietnam, it didn’t take long for Henry Cabot Lodge to decide that he just wanted Diem gone and for the US to engage more militarily. Convinced that a more robust front against the communists and better treatment of the South Vietnamese people by its leaders was the solutions to their problems, Lodge saw Diem as the obstacle to his vision of some kind of victory.

But Lodge made his biggest difference for the Kennedy administration before he even joined it. At the end of 1962, just when National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy was fleshing out his ideas for a diplomatic approach to Cuba with President Kennedy, Lodge – who learned about this from an official who worked closely with Bundy – told a lawyer affiliated with an anti-Castro Cuban committee that JFK was seeking to normalize relations with Cuba. In other words – peace with Castro – not overthrow Castro.

This of course was a total reversal from the intent in 1961 with the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the subsequent sabotage campaign of Cuba’s military resources, along with hair-brained attempts to assassinate Castro. This lawyer friend of Lodge’s in turn told a leading Cuban exile militant sponsored by the CIA named Felipe Vidal Santiago. Naturally, Santiago was beside himself with rage as were his fellow, rebel soldiers. This info undoubtedly upset their CIA handlers as well.

Lodge’s credibility to Castro’s enemies as a reliable informant rested on his esteemed career and pedigree. The grandson and namesake of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and the descendant of three, other US Senators, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. was elected first as a Massachusetts Congressman, then as a Senator himself in 1944. A leader of his party, Lodge, in 1952, drafted 5 star General and World War II hero Dwight Eisenhower to run for President, and served as his campaign manager. Although Lodge lost his Senate seat that year to John F. Kennedy, his stint as a recruiter and campaign manager succeeded in electing the general President. Lodge then served as Ambassador to the United Nations in Eisenhower’s cabinet for 7 years.

Lodge’s temperament in the arena of international politics during this time, is telling. As noted in Wikipedia:

…Lodge supported the Cold War policies of the Eisenhower Administration, and often engaged in debates with the UN representatives of the Soviet Union. During the CIA sponsored overthrowing of the legitimate Guatemalan Government, when Britain and France became concerned about the US being involved in the aggression, Lodge threatened to withdraw US support to Great Britain on Egypt and Cyprus, and France on Tunisia and Morocco, unless they backed the US in their action.

When the Government was overthrown, the United Fruit Company [a CIA front] re-established itself in Guatemala. These episodes tainted an otherwise distinguished career [up to that point] and painted Lodge as a face of US Imperialism.”

Lodge returned to electoral politics in 1960 as Richard Nixon’s running mate, losing again to Kennedy in a close election. Lodge somehow ingratiated himself to his opponent, the victor, however, and by 1963 was a fox lying in wait to guard a hen house in the Kennedy administration.

Lodge of course was a very intelligent and savvy man. He had to know the implications of declassifying such a sensitive, working policy of Kennedy’s to a close associate of Cuban radicals who were working in concert with the CIA to assassinate Castro. Lodge’s disclosure of a possible diplomatic restoration with Cuba was an irresponsible breach of the highest order, and it probably led to his back channel on the plan to kill JFK. In this context it is easier to understand Lodge’s hubris defying JFK’s instructions on relations with Diem and other Vietnam-related directives. JFK thought that Lodge would not survive his position as Ambassador, but instead, it was Kennedy who would not survive to replace Lodge.

Strategist Roger Stone has been involved in national political campaigns since the late 1960’s. At age 16 he was tapped by Connecticut Governor John Davis Lodge (Henry Cabot Lodge’s brother) to run the state’s “Youth For Nixon” organization. A prodigy campaign worker with a talent for dirty tricks, Stone was ingratiating himself to major players in the Republican party when he was barely out of his teens. By his mid-20’s he was a trusted confidant to President Nixon … and of his longtime mentor, John Davis Lodge.

In Stone’s best selling book The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, he recalls part of a conversation he had with Davis Lodge that is at once outrageous and chilling:

In 1979, we sat in his Westport, Connecticut home enjoying a cocktail. I knew that JFK had planned to fire ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge upon his return from Texas on November 24, 1963. I also know that Lodge knew why he had been summoned to see the President. I couldn’t resist asking John Lodge about his brother.

“Did you ever ask your brother who really killed Kennedy?” I said.

His lips spread into a tight grin. “Cabot said it was the Agency boys, some Mafiosi.” He looked me in the eye. “And Lyndon.”

“Did your brother know in advance?” I asked.

Lodge took a sip of his Manhattan. “He knew Kennedy wouldn’t be around to fire him. LBJ kept him at his post so he could serve his country.”

In his renowned book JFK and the Unspeakable, author James Douglass adds content confirming what Kennedy’s intentions were on this issue from another vantage point. In it, Douglass writes:

JFK’s death in Dallas preempted several decisions he was ready to make in Washington the following week. The first was the question of how to deal with his rebellious ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, who wanted to escalate and “win” the war the president had decided to withdraw from.

Robert Kennedy has commented on his brother’s loss of patience with an ambassador who would not carry out his instructions, or even give him the courtesy of a response to those instructions:

“The individual who forced our position at the time of Vietnam was Henry Cabot Lodge. In fact, Henry Cabot Lodge was being brought back – and the President discussed with me in detail how he could be fired – because he wouldn’t communicate in any way with us … The President would send out messages, and he would never really answer them … [Lodge] wouldn’t communicate. It was an impossible situation during that period of time.”

According to RFK, the President in consultation with the Attorney General had already made the decision to fire Lodge: “We were trying to figure out how to get rid of Henry Cabot Lodge.” It was only a matter of “trying to work out how he could be fired, how we could get rid of him.”

President Kennedy was scheduled to meet with Lodge on Sunday afternoon, November 24, as soon as JFK returned from his trip to Texas, and Lodge from his post in Vietnam. Kennedy had prepared for his encounter with Lodge by inviting to it a strong dissenter to the Vietnam War, Under Secretary of State George Ball. He talked to Ball by phone on Wednesday night, November 20, right after the White House reception for the judiciary, making sure that the most anti-war member of his administration would attend the Sunday meeting with Lodge.

It was his successor as president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who instead presided over the Sunday, November 24, meeting with Henry Cabot Lodge.

Before this meeting occurred however (and before John F. Kennedy would be assassinated), Lodge had another meeting to attend – in Honolulu while en route to DC – on November 20-21. It was just after this Honolulu conference to discuss Vietnam with other administration officials that Cabot Lodge was observed in a peculiar scene:

“In Hawaii on Nov. 21/63…shortly after lunch Honolulu time, U.S.Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge made a long distance call from the lobby of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel…This distinguished diplomat had access to phones in privacy from his room or the military circuits at no cost…yet he was seen, according to the Honolulu Star Bulletin, with a stack of quarters in his hand putting coin after coin into a pay phone…

Lodge was the only person of the seven member policy-making body to stay at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel…the others stayed in the military quarters.” *

Henry Cabot Lodge deserves further scrutiny as a character in this saga of assassination and conspiracy. He was detrimental to JFK’s safety by putting him on disastrous terms with the Central Intelligence Agency, over Cuba. Lodge’s role was unique in providing the CIA with the impetus to kill the President. Kennedy’s adversaries within the government, chiefly at the CIA and Pentagon, had a commitment to win the cold war at all costs. This is not just the view of conspiracy theorists, but also of multiple, government insiders, including JFK’s very own pick to represent him at brokering a peace deal with Castro – William Atwood. In Anthony Summer’s book Not In Your Lifetime, he quotes former UN Ambassador Atwood, as saying:

“If the CIA did find out what we were doing [talks toward normalizing relations with Cuba]…they might have been impelled to take violent action. Such as assassinating the President.”

What we’ve since learned from Summer’s interview with Atwood however is that the CIA did find out what they were doing…and we know how the agency found out, and from whom.

Et tu, Henry? Fox in the henhouse: Henry Cabot Lodge, A saboteur in the Kennedy State Department.

Like the Iraqi police in the previous post, the South Vietnamese army similarly was poorly motivated and relied on the US Army to do their fighting for them. Apparently they felt little or no allegiance to the South Vietnamese state, for reasons of which we will discuss below.

Although some ARVN soldiers fought well, many were lousy fighters who either would not advance on the enemy or would cut and run as soon as fighting broke out. They did not seem to have much loyalty to the South Vietnamese state. And sure enough, soon after the US pulled out, ARVN was rapidly defeated by a highly motivated NVA from North Vietnam along with whatever was left of the Viet Cong after Tet in 1968 and the Phoenix Program after that.

Supporters of the US war accuse North Vietnam of invading and interfering in the war, as if North and South Vietnam were valid states. Really there is just one country – Vietnam. The north was trying to reunify the country and had nationalism on its side.

The South was corrupt, a regime of landlords and traitors who had previously worked for the French colonials and now worked for the US invaders who more or less colonized Vietnam after the French left.

2% of the population controlled 98% of the land. The Viet Cong took up the land reform question. This question more than anything else drove the war. But like many rightwing regimes, land reform was never to be unveiled. The rich simply refused to give up their feudal power, the war dragged on and on, and in the end, the South’s feudal landlords lost it all.

A lot of Left revolutions in the 3rd World have been driven more by the land question than anything else. A land reform is no big deal. You get paid for your land. But many states put it off forever and end up with a FARC, a Chavez, a Morales, an FMLN, Sandinistas, an NPA or a Viet Cong. There’s no putting off the land question. Until you deal with it, your nation will be in continuous turmoil.

This is extremely shocking footage of Indonesian soldiers in West Papua torturing a Papuan man and his father.

Indonesia stole West Papua from the Papuans in 1965, and has waged a genocidal and racist war against the Papuans ever since, a war that has killed 100,000 Papuans. Soldiers are extremely racist and view Papuans as little more than animals.

Papuans try to fight back using very primitive weapons, but they are no match for the modern Indonesian military. US imperialism has backed the Indonesians to the hilt in this war because US corporations want to exploit various raw materials in Papua.

The footage was filmed on a cellphone in May by one of the soldiers taking part in a military operation in the Punkak Jaya region of the Central Highlands of West Papua. The operation was launched against the Free Papua Movement, an armed group seeking freedom from Indonesian colonialism, but the troops are mostly just torturing, raping and murdering civilians like they always do.

It is apparently “trophy footage.” This video is just a small part of a much larger video that shows the two men being tortured. In the bigger video, the older man is stripped naked, has a bag put over his head and has a burning stick applied to his genitals while he screams in agony. The young man has a knife held to his face.

Details of who the victims are hard to come by since the area is a closed military zone, and journalists are banned from the area. However, the older man is missing and probably dead, while the young man has been released.

Indonesian troops have been killing, torturing and raping Papuans with impunity since 1963. Victims have been as young as 3 years old.

For many years, Indonesian troops have been taking trophy photos, now escalating to films, of Papuans being killed and raped. They show this media to Papuans in order to humiliate them.

The footage appeared just recently, on October 20, 2010 and caused a bit of a media stir.